This piece is part of the Wine notebook, which features original art by Su Yu-Xin.

In June 2022, we published the Wine notebook, which features thirteen writers who expand the lyric landscape of taste, smell, and image through stories centering the transformative influence of wine. As part of the notebook, we adapted images from artist Su Yu-Xin’s oeuvre of elemental paintings that play with natural, earthly textures. Su created these works between 2017 and 2022 and in a number of them utilized naturally occurring minerals, handmade pigments, and hand-shaped recycled woods and flax-prepared boards. With unique, vividly emotional color stories and brush strokes that feel like ripples of thought, sense memory, and multiple realities folding in on themselves, Su’s work offers a striking parallel to the themes in this notebook.

In her artist’s statement, Su writes: 

Su Yu-Xin considers painting as a place where multiple disciplines and various perceptual capacities intersect. Painters have always played a vital role in the visual art industry, and the medium of painting reflects the discovery and reinvention of the material world. Hence, paintings bear witness to the history of the exchange between cultures and nature and project the painter’s role through wars and migrations; they manifest territorial invasions, restitutions, the exploitation of pigments and their trades. While the history of painting often emphasizes the stylistic evolution of image production, the technology of color pigments also evolves contemporaneously. Su Yu-Xin collects, studies, and processes these color substances scattered on the earth’s crust. From there, she invents a new order on the painting surface through drawing, compression, and accumulation. For her, such landscape painting is a geological practice of rearranging plants, minerals, and organic and synthetic matters.

Su was born in 1991 in Hualien, Taiwan, and now lives and works between Shanghai and Taipei. She holds an MFA degree from Slade School of Fine Art, University of College London, and a BA in ink painting from Taipei National University of the Arts. Su has held solo exhibitions at Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts and Liste Art Fair Basel (online), and has shown internationally in numerous group exhibitions including at UCCA Dune (Qinhuangdao, 2021), Edouard Malingue Gallery (Shanghai, 2021), TaiKang Space (Beijing, 2020), MadeIn Gallery (Shanghai, 2020), Lawrie Shabibi (Dubai, 2020), UCCA Beijing (Beijing, 2019), 798 Art Centre (Beijing, 2019), National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taichung, 2018), Long March Space (Beijing, 2018), and Saatchi Gallery (London, 2016). 

Su has written about color theory as it’s been perceived through “specific material legacies,” the need for more expansive and liberated color identification systems, and her practice on color in “A Color Study Leading Towards Materialism.” The essay can be read on her website.